Trayvon Martin case leads to corporate exodus from ALEC

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George Zimmerman invoked the ALEC-supported 'Stand Your Ground' law to justify his killing of Trayvon Martin.

Last week, as George Zimmerman was being charged with second-degree murder for killing Trayvon Martin in Florida, big business began a quiet stampede away from the organization that is promoting “shoot-first” laws throughout the country.

The organization, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), is a far-right policy incubator whose members include corporations, think tanks and lawmakers, who introduce its model bills simultaneously in statehouses nationwide. The proposed legislation ranges from industry-specific measures such as a bill vetoed last week by Gov. Mark Dayton limiting liability in asbestos injuries to the ideological, such as voter ID and shoot-first.

In total over the last two years Minnesota lawmakers have introduced some 60 bills identical or very similar to model legislation drafted by ALEC. Seven of Dayton’s 12 vetoes so far this year have been of ALEC-promulgated measures, including a shoot-first or Castle Doctrine bill.

ALEC has been in existence since 1973, but in the last year a handful of organizations including Common Cause, Parents United and the progressive Center for Media and Democracy have begun tracking its activities. It wasn’t until the high-profile Trayvon Martin case, however, that ALEC’s activities drew widespread attention.

Neighborhood Watch captain Zimmerman told police he thought he was justified in shooting the unarmed teen under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, a National Rifle Association-promoted act which states that “a person is justified in the use of deadly force” if “he or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony.”

In the wake of the shooting, a number of grassroots and civil-rights organizations began pushing ALEC’s corporate members, whose dues underwrite the group’s activities, to cut their ties. Companies pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to join; ALEC routinely pays for lawmakers, whose dues are just $50 a year, to travel to meetings at resorts where they are handed policy playbooks.

Ten had resigned by end of week

By close of business Friday, the list of corporations and nonprofits dropping memberships in ALEC had lengthened to 10: Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Kraft Foods, Intuit, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Mars, Reed-Elsevier, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Arizona Public Service Co.

“At this point, we’ve decided that it’s not the right environment to continue working with them,” a Gates Foundation spokesman told Reuters. Separately, the foundation said it did not intend to support ALEC’s ideological work but had thought it was paying for distribution of its education reform research.

Even corporations no longer affiliated with the controversial arch-conservative policy incubator appeared to be trying to distance themselves. Ticketmaster last week sent a letter to the Center for Media and Democracy, which operates the website ALECexposed, “advising” the organization to “cease and desist from including Ticketmaster on your site” and threatening to sue for libel and defamation.

An exhaustive catalog of information on past and present ALEC members, the site listed Ticketmaster as a one of the corporations that was known to be a member in 2000 but was not currently.

By midweek, the normally secretive ALEC was swinging back. “Over the last 24 hours, ALEC has been inundated with letters of support from elected officials, community leaders and concerned citizens in response to the intimidation campaign launched by a coalition of extreme liberal activists committed to silencing anyone who disagrees with their agenda,” said Executive Director Ron Scheberle.

Local group presses MN members

Common Cause Minnesota, meanwhile, called for ALEC’s local corporate members to follow suit. Minnesota members include 3M, UnitedHealth Group, Xcel Energy and Cargill. Update: After publication of this story, a Cargill spokeswoman informed MinnPost that Cargill is not and has never been a member of ALEC and doesn’t know why it was listed in a 1998 ALEC annual-meeting program, obtained by Common Cause, as a member and sponsor.

Other companies with deep ties to Minnesota and memberships in ALEC include Thomson Reuters, Comcast, Corrections Corporation of America, Time Warner and State Farm.

“It’s time for Minnesota legislators to quit promoting corporate special interests at the expense of middle-class families,” said Mike Dean, executive director. “As the country’s largest corporations end their relationships with this radical group, Minnesota corporations should too.”

Minnesota’s elected ALEC members, most of them GOP lawmakers, have been distancing themselves from the group ever since its efforts were first revealed by a variety of local organizations in the wake of the 2011 legislative session. Confronted about introducing a bill that is identical to an ALEC model or quite similar, local lawmakers have protested that they haven’t had the time or the money to attend the group’s gatherings or that they got the idea for the legislation elsewhere.

Bills drafted by Minensotans for Lawsuit Reform just happened to track ALEC model bills? I suppose it could happen, in some fantasy world.

It would be interesting to know how closely MfLR’s membership tracks that of ALEC. We can’t find that out, however, because the “grassroots” organization Minnesotans for Lawsuit Reform gets pretty vague about exactly who its principals might be. We do, however, know that Mr. Kulda is registered as one of their lobbyists.

I like it when articles lists the MN Legislators who author or co-author certain bills. You can read the bill and then compare it to ALEC Bills. Then you know which Legislators are representing corporations instead of the people.
Some bills stick out.. Like the Voter ID, Castle Law, Charter School take over of Public schools.
But it is nice to know which authors “wrote” those bills. Those Legislative Authors had to slap their name and the state on MN on those “model” bills. It is Shameful, and if I had a MN Legislator I would be calling their office and tell them to publically condemn A.L.E.C. and withdrawl their membership and to promise not to author or co-author any bills from the A.L.E.C. list.

So ALEC’s boilerplate text for laws, distributed around the country to state legislators, is only ONE example of who is actually writing our laws.

The state legislators in MN who presented bills written by ALEC, like good lap-dogs, come to the shame of distancing themselves from ALEC a little late in the game.

Is it possible that our legislators could respond with a little skepticism when someone approaches them with a piece of canned legislation?

A working boycott campaign against all corporations who give to extremist groups, right or left, would soon dry up significant financial resources for groups like ALEC. It is amazing that the Gates foundation was so ignorant of who they were supporting – don’t they do any research?

Other groups will pop up to replace ALEC’s agenda. For example, Student’s First will probably be the one to take over ALEC’s privatization education agenda. Such wonderful, Orwellian names these groups have.

is called Tort Reform by the national Republican Party (and I am sure, by ALEC). One of their goals is to indemnify corporations from meaningful payouts when their products or practices significantly harm customers or employees. They plan to do it by capping awards at a low, corporate-approved level.

The Gates Foundation may or may not have been aware of everything ALEC does, but it does support school reform in the same ways ALEC and all the far Right does — attack teachers and thereby the public school system, fire teachers and close schools, replace them with private charters and/or professional “managers” instead of educators and elected school boards.

is an ALEC front group, or “alter ego.” All of these “tort reform” organizations are big business astroturf outfits created to lobby for legislation designed to prevent ordinary citizens from gaining access to the civil justice system when they are injured. They claim to be against “frivolous lawsuits” but from their perspective, any claim of injury by a human being is “frivolous.” Just as they portrayed the elderly lady who sustained third degree burns from McDonald’s coffee spilling on her. I agree with Mr. Rovick above who states that these corporations will simply find new tools to lobby for “reforms” that rob people of their rights.

Oddly enough, the party of “personal responsibility” not only wants to remove public oversight of corporate misdeeds by dismantling government agencies, they also want to remove oversight via the private sector in the form of “tort reform”.

for your articles describing the workings of ALEC here and nationally. And thanks to Governor Dayton and all the Democratic members of the Minnesota legislature who do everything they can to prevent ALEC’s harmful/anti-democratic legislation from taking effect while never losing their sense of humor or dedication to public service.

Now we need an uprising of real Republicans who see what is going on and are upset with many in their party whose current policy is to serve the wants and wishes of our country’s largest corporations instead of the needs of their constituents.

Here we have a child, Travon, that is out walking around at 1am and his parents don’t have clue of his where- abouts. The child has a confrontation with an adult and gets shot because he doesn’t have the sense to be in bed at that late hour. Then we have a mother that trademarks his sons name due to his death….. So we blame the adult that is a neighborhood watch member who happens to carry a gun. So then we blame a corporation that supports personal responsibility. This reminds me of the Direct TV commercials on television where the cable viewer does all sorts of weird thing due to being mad at the cable company. Am I missing something here??????

You should really check your facts, because you don’t have much right here The shooting occurred at 7:15 PM, not 1 AM, for starters. There’s no “doesn’t have the sense to be in bed at that late hour” here.

You blame Martin for the confrontation, yet, from all evidence, he was merely walking home from the store (at 7 PM), when he was confronted by Zimmerman, an armed stranger.

As for the trademarking, that’s completely irrelevant to the topic of discussion: ALEC and “Stand Your Ground,” and I question your motives for raising it here.

Anyway, his mother took that step after other people started selling merchandise using her son’s likeness and name.

“If you trademark the name, that’s going to prevent others from doing it and potentially capitalizing on it in a negative way or a different way than you want,” said Victor Baranowski, a patent attorney with the law firm Schmeiser, Olsen and Watts, to HuffPost. “In a case like this, there’s gonna be others who would want to. So does she want to let somebody else do something with her son’s name or does she want it for herself?”

You can hardly blame someone from taking steps to prevent other people from profiting from her dead son’s name and picture.

I have some reservations about censoring comments at all, but in general commenting at Minnpost is excellent. Since there is purportedly a review process in place how did this “Am I missing something?” comment get published, given the significant amount of stupidity and pointlessness relative to its length? And to answer the subject title’s question, yes you are missing something.

ALEC is an organization that provides boilerplate language to conservative legislators for laws that are universally popular with the conservative movement. Most deal with 2nd amendment rights, voter fraud, tax reform, government union reform, etc.

The Left has similar organizations, I’m sure, we just don’t hear about them because most normal people wouldn’t care how the bills actually get written.

Their only role is to provide convenient, off-the-shelf bills, the legalese language of which is tedious to write, especially if you’re not a professional legislator or a lawyer. So what?!

Do you in your naive heart really think that shutting down ALEC will stop legislation favored by conservatives? It will just be written by others at greater time and cost.